Department of Trade and Industry

I entirely agree, and that applies not just when it appears that fairly disreputable people in the science community are saying something, as in the confusion over MMR, where the scientific evidence was all weighted on one side and a lone operator was questioning it. The press, however, gave equal balance to him. It is difficult for the public to know quite where to stand, and it is difficult for Ministers. The report is important because it deals with the advice given to Ministers and the form in which it is given. As I said, that process affects virtually every Department. Energy is an area of great importance and food science is critical. We excel at food science in this country, but the public are increasingly concerned about it. If evidence is given in the wrong way, the scare is already in the Daily Mail—a newspaper that I would ban if I were a dictator, because it does more harm to public opinion than anything else. That probably means that I shall get a bad sketch. Actually, I will not, because there are no journalists present—even if I could see them. That is typical of the interest shown in scientific matters. The report’s key point is that we not only have to make Ministers more literate, but that the advice to them must be more independent and should be perceived as being so. I intervened on the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) about this. I would like to claim that the 1997 election was just a matter of the public overwhelmingly deciding that I should not continue as science Minister, but the reality is that leaving the Laboratory of the Government Chemist, the National Physical Laboratory and many others outside Government meant that the concept of a technical civil service went with them. We should consider that area carefully. Recently, I published a proposal that was widely unread because it was a press release from a Conservative Back Bencher, but it said that there should be a Department for science and innovation, with a Secretary of State responsible for it in the Cabinet. I know that the Secretary of State to whom the Minister reports is in the Cabinet, and the same applied under the previous Conservative Government: the Minister for science was not in the Cabinet, but the Secretary of State asked for briefings just before Cabinet meetings, in case something interesting came up. I will go further. Science is now so central to Government that a department for science and innovation should be responsible not only for the things for which the Minister is already responsible, but for the co-ordination of a technical civil service, and it should work with various scientific advisers in the Departments. When Ministers are dealing with an issue—the environment, defence or transport—such a department should be a central resource whose advice is respected within Government. I would have included technology in that department, which has been put in another Department under the Prime Minister’s reforms, because the two go well together. I have also advocated a move to smarter public procurement, which is another responsibility that could have been included in the Department. Sadly, I do not have the ability nowadays to do much more than issue press releases. However, I hope that the Government absorb some of the message that I am trying to convey because although, as a Conservative, I should like a Conservative Government in the near future, in the national interest, we cannot continue to wait. That takes me back to the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson). The public are ill informed. It is not their fault—in a way, it is ours. Successive Governments have never grasped the need for more scientific literacy in schools. We are still struggling. Even according to the Government’s figures, we are doing much worse than we should be in ensuring that every school child has some understanding of basic science and mathematics—by that, I mean making our children numerate as well as literate. We do not enable them to understand risk, and then we are surprised when, as adults, they are not scientifically literate and cannot evaluate. I did not think that anyone remembered that something had happened before 1997, but I am flattered because I suddenly noticed that the report quotes me. Paragraph 190 states that, as science Minister, I"““proposed a scale of risk which would provide ‘a series of common situations of varying risk to which people can relate’.””" I called it a scientific Richter scale. We have a Richter scale in a different context; why not have one for science? The report goes into considerable detail, which I have no time to repeat, but we must find a way of communicating to a currently scientific illiterate public the way in which they should react in a set of circumstances. Let me make a crude comparison, which is contemporary rather than the best example. When the car bombs, which thankfully did not explode in London recently, were announced to the public, there was no panic because somehow, at the same time, the extent of risk that they should assume was communicated to them. Although the risk was high, other factors meant that there was no panic. We are lucky that, so far, a biological or chemical attack has not taken place in London. The public will not understand degrees of risk in something so invisible and difficult to grasp. Tragically, we know about car bombs and the damage that they can do, but we are ill educated about the consequences of a biological or chemical attack in this city. We must start preparing the public in ways they can understand about how to react without scaring them. It is a complex art and I do not claim that I have an instant solution, but we must start thinking about it.